Blizzard has 4,700 employees across 11 cities

Blizzard Entertainment is kind of a big deal -- you already knew that. But did you know that the studio is such a big deal that it spans "4,700 employees across 11 cities?" That's a lot of people! And while many of said employees are saddled with customer support roles, a whopping 750 are assigned to product development, which spans WoW, StarCraft, Diablo, and the still-unannounced "Project Titan" MMO (not to mention anything else Blizzard has cooking behind-the-scenes).

Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce discussed the astounding statistic during a panel at DICE last week, using the numbers to put context behind his company's lack of preparedness when launching World of Warcraft way back in aught four. "I don't think we had any idea what we were getting ourselves into," Pearce admitted, as reported by industry trade site Gamasutra. "We had to stop shipping boxes to stores." Resultantly, the company now makes "more aggressive" predictions for its various launches, and has its many hundreds of support employees at the ready for said launches.